


setanka's bestiary

by muined



Category: Political RPF - Russian 20th c., The Death of Stalin (2017)
Genre: Gen, explain-o-fic, interstitial to canon, people as aminals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-02-01 01:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21304391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muined/pseuds/muined
Summary: Snakes and crocodiles, her father’d said, but from what she’d seen it was snakes coming and going. A diptych.
Relationships: Lavrenti Beria & Svetlana Stalina
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	setanka's bestiary

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first half of this in an attempt to reconcile the movie’s treatment of the Kapler affair with history, and because Svetlana and Beria’s relationship fascinates me. Those photos of the two of them together when she was a kid! How she shifts blame from her father to him in _Twenty Letters to a Friend_ and _Only One Year_! And yet in _tDoS_ she gets along better with him than with anyone else. I appended the second half (a...dream sequence…?) because I realized Svetlana ought to speak for herself. This is a spring story: I wrote it in spring, on buses and trains and in cars, and while listening to string quartets, of all things: Schubert’s 11th, Dvořák’s 12th. Corny dialogue courtesy of the movie. Warning for reference to requisite creepin' from Mr. Bad Guy.

> “Now all the ugliness inside him came into the open—he couldn’t hold it back.”
> 
> —Svetlana Alliluyeva on Beria’s behavior after Stalin’s death, _Twenty Letters to a Friend_.

Svetlana leant over the balustrade to survey the Hall of Columns and then drew back, her weight on her heels, supported by her wrists like a child hanging off of the wrought-iron bars of a zoo enclosure. “Rather overwhelming, isn’t it?” she said. “And nobody’s making them do this, are they?”

“No, no,” Beria assured her.

“No.”

He afforded her silence, aware of the delicacy necessary here, how well he’d do to avoid upsetting her—and at a minor loss for what to say. But comfortable in Svetlana’s presence, and her in his, as intellectual equals could be. He busied himself by trying to make sense of her hair: her updo was as bouffant as her brother’s, her father’s, and whorled in the back to form a wreath or bird’s nest but falling to pieces at the sides. An anodyne Party-approved shift dress, black for mourning. Otherwise unadorned. Beria watched her study her own interlocked fingers. “I don’t suppose you want a chair?” he offered.

“Ah, no, no no, I can’t sit down, I haven’t sat down since he died. One can’t, he was too big,” she said, cryptically.

“...Yes,” he agreed.

She bent in toward him, suddenly, her ear almost to his shoulder. She was exactly his height, but in heels taller. “D’you remember Alexei?” she asked.

How many Alexeis had he processed that week alone? “I remember everyone; it’s a gift,” he bluffed, automatically. When her father had played this same guessing game with him, it had always been safest to lie off the bat and hope for more clues as the conversation continued.

“D’you remember the way he used to laugh?” she prompted further, giving his arm a squeeze. Was she testing him or just trying to jog his memory?

Beria laughed himself, for want of anything else to do, then realized who she meant. No. “Alexei Kapler. Yes. Yes.” God, no. Why would he have remembered how Alexei fucking Kapler laughed?

Svetlana grinned. “Yes!”

No, not Kapler. Years ago he (forty or so) had adored her (sixteen) publicly, as something of a protest against Stalin. Stalin had seen to Kapler, though like a bad rouble he had kept turning up again. But Beria had interned him afresh just the month before. Stalin was dead, and Svetlana again unmarried. He’d coveted her, yes, before Kapler, at fifteen or so in a tiered, eyeletted white dress unsuited to her. They’d been on a spring holiday in the Caucasus; she’d led him under a row of lindens and crouched to point out a ball of writhing blacksnakes. Beria was assailed by competing, hypocritical desires to protect her from Kapler’s monstrous affections and to expose her to his own. The mess of serpents, Svetlana’s open, expectant face. She’d always sought him out for a reaction to the animal specimens she found. He’d never known why she’d chosen him for this role; she couldn’t have known consciously that she was uniting like with like. But Kapler. “Yes, special to you, of course,” Beria said, choosing his words carefully. “Some unsuitable associates. Tragic, really. I’m, I’m so sorry.”

“Yes, well, I want you to bring him back,” she said matter-of-factly, smiling still, and very near him now. She smelt of black tea. “The way that you brought Molotov’s wife back.” Two husbands later, apparently, she remembered her admirer as a suave, worldly artist, not rightly as a mouldering old mountebank whose courtship had been a performance piece. He had only risen in her esteem with time and with Stalin’s disapproval. She’d stood in the dim exhibition hall of her memory before his wax figure, twisting the velvet cordon in her hands. And why not, with who she had around to compare him with? The margins of Svetlana’s young life had, like an illuminated manuscript’s, always crawled with man-faced chimeras. Roiling masses of them, Bukharin’s animalia animated.

She’d mentioned Polina. “She. Well, I’d kept her, as—” As a bargaining chip for future power struggles, but Svetlana didn’t need to know that. He didn’t bother completing the clause. If things broke bad, he’d spirit her away like he had Polina, though of course here he’d be more delicate. Setanka secreted in some green Georgian hollow, a housemistress proper, her high forehead under her kerchief so like young Nina’s—but Nina was neither here nor there. No, Svetlana’s hair unbound and at sixes and sevens, red as an orange peel against the plum blossoms. Svetlana a child of eight and worrying his overcoat. Looking up at him—down at him, now.

“Yeah, but I just want one person! Just one person.” One person. He held no misconceptions about his looks, or her feelings for him. At twelve she’d hoisted up a popeyed toad for his inspection: “Look, Lavrenti: just like you! Look!” When he looked at her now, half the time he saw her as she was: a woman of twenty-seven, twice married already. The other half she was a schoolgirl in gymnasium tunic. Like an optical illusion in which one saw either a hag or a maiden—she was his goddaughter or she was her father’s parting gift to the man who’d had everything. Duck or rabbit. Never both at once.

No, she hadn’t once thought of him the way he thought of her half the time. But if he offered no alternative...Lenin’s people had been turned out onto the street after his death; he could intimate that the same could happen to her and her kin unless she allowed him to extend a protective membranous wing over her alone. Under assumed names they could make it to France, or as far afield as South America, North. In the United States he’d be called Lawrence and she Lana. A hushed civil ceremony. The officiant shooting him a dirty look. Her father safely embalmed, lying in state, and her souse brother embalmed too, in vodka, lying in an institution somewhere.

“Oh, my darling.” And then in the event that he managed all of this according to plan, if he played his cards exactly right, a utopian libertine future awaited the two of them within the Soviet Union. _The king is turning in his grave / the queen of hearts now loves the knave._ A discreet divorce for him, and a third unsuitable husband for Svetlana. A state-sanctioned commemorative ballet reenacting their courtship. Oh, but there wouldn’t be; if Beria had his druthers the school of socialist realism would be abolished, and dance would be allowed once again to be art and athleticism only, with no morals attached. There’d be no more Lunacharskys to judge and censor. Still, the thought of a dozen red-headed understudies for the leading lady waiting in the wings—

“Please,” she said. When in her orbit his logic was baffled. Reuniting her with Kapler was out of the question, but he couldn’t refuse her. Perhaps if she met Kapler again, now, she’d see through him. But then she was alone and vulnerable now—and after all she hadn’t yet seen through Beria, so far as he could tell. He searched her face but could make out nothing in her eyes save his own figure reflected. She trusted his word. He’d tell her, that was it, he’d tell her later that Kapler was irretrievable, killed, that it couldn’t be helped, and that he’d had nothing to do with it. So it was decided. She’d be upset, of course, very, but he’d be there to console her.

A metallic taste in his mouth like that of tart cherries. A piano concerto, memorized rote some thirty years prior. This was a madness. “For you I will attempt the impossible,” he promised. Somewhere between nine and fourteen, at another Tbilisi garden party—midsummer, dusk, paper lanterns—she’d brought him a glowworm, pulsing with dull light, squirming dopily, druggedly in the shadow of her palm.

> _Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life._

After all was done, the serpent came upon the woman again. She was standing at the edge of the garden, clothed but barefoot; he wove through the grass and brushed past her ankle. She seemed indeed to bear him enmity, as when she picked him up she held his head between her thumb and forefinger such that he couldn’t open his mouth.

“You don’t trust me,” he hissed through grit fangs.

The woman was not afeared to hear him speak, as she was accustomed to communing with all manner of beast. “Why _would_ I trust you?” When she brought him to her eye level, he saw that she’d been crying.

“Ah. I suppose Khrushchev’s told you all about me, then.”

“Yes, indeed. I’m no great fan of his, either, but.” 

She loosened her grip of him slightly, so he was able to speak more freely. “The lesser of two evils, you think? Oh, Christ, you study history. You and he are going to write the definitive history, aren’t you? You and the victor?”

“I can’t imagine...it’s a muddle, I can’t imagine making sense of any of it. But any account I produce will be my own.”

“You’ll be harsh with me.”

“By rights I will have to censure you. My conscience—I have one of those—wouldn’t allow anything else. You’ll deserve it.” She brought the heel of her hand to her forehead. “It’s funny, I thought—in the days leading up to the funeral I actually got to thinking that I’d misjudged you, when I was younger. That I’d been led astray by public opinion of you, coming up through school, and that really you were kind, if married to your work. You, a kind person. Can you imagine? I’d had no-one at all to talk to, and you were the only one of your lot who could hold a conversation. My father’s pet spy. Silly little spy.”

“We were both of us your father’s pets. Vienna. I always liked Vienna. Do you suppose you’ll ever think of me?”

“I can’t see how I’d avoid it. But Comrade Khrushchev’s changed his mind and decided—what a wheeler and dealer he’s become!—that I’ll be of more use to him here, for a little while at least. I’m to say nice things about him in exchange for someday, maybe, a choice of home. It’s political expediency, solely. But I guess the same could’ve been said of you. Wasn’t I stupid then? Little fool. I have no illusions now.”

“You know it was different.”

“I will think of you, from time to time. I’ll find it hard to believe that I knew you. Rather a monster of the old school, weren’t you? An old barbar, a butcher from a fairy story. I do understand why Khrushchev did what he did—the world couldn’t set to turning again while you lived.”

“But now it turns.”

“Too fast. I think perhaps America.”

“Hm?”

“After I’m done here. I feel an American theme. A song, I mean, in me. You wouldn’t understand.”

“No, I do, Svetulya.” She tensed at the pet name, discomfited. “Svetlana. I was always as romantic as you, as poetical. Do you remember when I first escorted you to the theatre? On your father’s command, of course, while I was—I think I was Yezhov’s deputy. Yes. An eleven-year-old girl accompanied by two rows of armed chekists to see Shakespeare.”

“A little tsarina I was. Do you know, I cried yesterday only once: when I remembered that at age nine I’d thought of you as my best friend. Tell me, what kind of childhood is that?”

“I bought you your first ice cream.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember it had cherries on it.”

“That was yours. You really haven’t much of a memory at all. Only things of direct interest to you. Selfish.”

“Your father saw the bad in me and he drew it out. He drew it out of me.”

“What, like oil pulling? Is this going to be our conversation? Just going in circles arguing about how hard each of us had it?” She laughed. Here the serpent arrived finally at the reason he had for so long coveted her: she was able to laugh at absurdity. He had done the same, to a point. But he had too often swallowed his laughter. If he’d refused more often to tolerate nonsense, to perpetuate it, he might’ve turned out differently.

“Your father took your life, he took my life, and both of them he snapped over his knee. Indiscriminately, without mercy.”

“Ha. How dare you compare yourself to me.” He had coiled around her forearm, but here she shook him off and held him at arm’s length.

“We had the same thing done to us.” They were exactly alike, he’d thought more than once, both of them with a foot in each of two worlds.

“A babe in the woods, you were? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“I,” he began, “was made what I am. All that I am. I was made,” he said, knowing it to be untrue.

“Look at you, even now the politician. Spinning, Lavra, making excuses; obviously you’ve convinced yourself effectively. No. You always made sure to make a pretence of protesting, but you always had a choice. You are exactly what you chose to become. You are the sum of your choices, and nothing more.”

“I couldn’t help myself,” he said, more honestly.

“You always _helped yourself_,” she said, enunciating each word. The serpent could taste her pure, distillate, incandescent anger: the taste of copper, the color of it, greening at the edges. The love of her. “You’re no better than Yezhov or Yagoda.”

“I’m nothing like them,” he said, thrashing his tail in disgust.

“You’re _exactly_ like them. Worse. You’re a brute, but you’re an intriguer too. And Yezhov believed in his work; you didn’t, but you simply didn’t _care_. You’ve never cared for anyone but yourself.”

“I always cared for you.”

“What would you have done if you’d won? You’d’ve wanted my, hah, my hand in marriage, yes? I’d have refused you, and you’d’ve had me thrown in prison. That’s the problem with you snakes, isn’t it. Don't care a whit for things you didn’t or can’t consume. How could you think you deserved to have me?”

“Deserved? I didn’t. I don’t. I know I don’t. But then life isn’t fair.”

She was silent. She was walking, westward, out of the garden, onto a plain of waving wheat and toward the horizon, toward purple mountains and a sun that looked like a sun in one of the John Ford Westerns that both of them had been forced to watch since her childhood. She set her lips in a purposeful frown and hummed a little of the Star-Spangled Banner.

“You’ll make a fine American,” he said.

“Do you mean that, or is it more perfidy? Oh, what does it matter. I’m just a figment of your dying brain’s fevered imagination.”

“Or I yours, Lana.”

“Don’t give yourself too much credit, beastie. I should hope that on my deathbed I’ll put my brain to use on matters of more consequence than the outline of one bad man’s life. I have children who, thank God, won’t care about the trajectory of a torturer I knew as a girl.” She said this with a measure of sympathy; she stroked his head with her thumb. He saw that her life’s arc would indeed overreach his own, and he felt sympathy for her in turn. He saw eras go by like parade floats, bearing her away from him.

“There’s some comfort in inconsequence,” he said.

“Don’t take too much,” she advised him. The Hollywood sun dipped below the horizon, and the darkness of night was upon them again.


End file.
